Tuesday, February 20, 2007

A weekend in the city!

It's my last night in Aix-En-Provence, and due to the lack of local shops I've walked a long way to find an open bar. And it's a football night."Bonsoir""Bonsoir, une stella artois si vous plais""Pint?""Oh Yes please, thankyou""Ah ha! English!"

I'm in France catching up with Dr Fusion who has recently become my first ever ex-pat buddy. For someone who only ever learnt 5 words of French in school (I did Spanish) I feel I've done OK and had a pretty good time over here. And any contempt waiters might have felt for our lack of French and lunchtime coffee-drinking has been outweighed by my insisting on introducing my mate as Monsieur L'Ingineur. That holds a lot of kudos in this part of town.

I can see why English people totally fall for Provence- it's really pretty nice, like England would be if we hadn't wrecked it. Everyone drinks and no-one gets disorderly, everyone smokes but no-one has a hacking cough, and every woman under 40 is slim and beautiful. I also really like the French sense of drama- girls skipping out into the road with bags of shopping causing exaggerated braking and collisions, animated conversations in narrow streets that I can't understand, and the fact that the homeless are on strike. I'm still trying to figure that one out, but every city currently has a huge tent city at its centre.

Yep, overall we love France. Except Marseilles which is a complete dump. I'm dying to learn some French and not sound totally stupid next time. Kind of hard to seduce a beautiful chain smoking brunette with "Hello" and "thankyou".